James Elkins

News:

New book! What Heaven Looks Like. Passed the 300,000 word mark on my work in progress. Writing every day! Please use the contact form to schedule lectures, studio visits, or seminars. I'm using Academia.edu as a message board. If you download something of mine that's posted there, send me a note: I'm always glad to answer questions. See Lectures page for my travel schedule.

I have decided not to find a publisher forThe Impending Single History of Art.(Too many years spent pursuing academic publishers.) It's the last of my art history books, and the one with the most information about global art history. I'm going to be posting it in its entirety on this site and on Academia. The chapters are on Google Drive, so they're live and always up to date. Please send comments & criticism here.

The Art Seminar

(New York: Routledge, 2005-2008)

The Art Seminar is a series of seven books, involving hundreds of scholars from around the word. All the titles are available through the Amazon aStore.

The idea of the series is to be conversational and open-ended, producing a cross-section of current understandings on each topic. The reasons for the open architecture and dialectic form of the series are set out in the Series Preface, which is uploaded here.

In the last volume of the series there's a Series Afterword, taking stock of the entire project. What seemed especially interesting was the differing degrees of incoherence in the seven subjects, which may be indicative of the current state of theorizing.

A graph of the subject keywords listed by art historians in the Bibliography of the History of Art. The graph shows that despite rumors that "theory" is a thing of the past, it continues to grow in the self-descriptions of art historians. More material on this subject is in vol. 3 of this series, in the essay "Art History as a Global Discipline," and in the lecture "Is Art History Global?" (on this site, on the Lectures page).

A poster for the final event in the series, Chicago, 2007.

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